Whatever You Do, Make Sure Your Work Is “Good Work”
There’s a line from American writer Dave Eggers that keeps circling back in my mind: “What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand.” It’s one of those sentences that feels almost too simple at first glance. No fireworks. No strategy. No hustle. […]
Stop NOT Writing Songs: Why Writing Badly Is Better Than Not Writing at All
You know, there’s a particular weight that unfinished songs carry. Not the kind that sits loudly on your desk, but the quiet kind. The song you keep meaning to start. The lyric you circled weeks ago. The melody that showed up once and then vanished because you didn’t catch it in time. These songs don’t […]
“There’s a Song in That.” Developing the Songwriter’s Way of Seeing the World
Songwriting doesn’t begin when you pick up a guitar, sit at a piano, or open a DAW. It begins much earlier than that. It begins in how you move through the world, how you notice things, and how you respond to your own life as it’s happening. Long before a song has chords or lyrics, […]
What Songwriters Can Learn From Authors About Longevity
Songwriters and authors don’t often get mentioned in the same breath, but they wrestle with remarkably similar problems. Yet there’s one area where authors often have a quieter advantage: they tend to think long-term by default. Songwriters, on the other hand, are frequently pushed toward short cycles, instant reactions, and constant output. There’s a lot […]
Songwriting: The Art of Saying More With Less
One of the quiet truths about songwriting is that you’re working with the smallest canvas in all of storytelling. A novel can wander for chapters. A film can take two hours to build a world. A songwriter gets a verse, a chorus, maybe a bridge, and a melody to carry it all. That limitation isn’t […]
The Slow, Boring, Unstoppable Power of Consistency in Songwriting
People love the idea of sudden inspiration. It’s dramatic. It feels mystical. It makes for a good story. But the truth underneath it all is far less glamorous and far more useful: the songwriters who win the long game aren’t the ones waiting for lightning. They’re the ones quietly turning up, day after day, doing […]
What John Steinbeck Can Teach Us About Songwriting Flow
John Steinbeck wasn’t a songwriter, but he knew something about creativity that every songwriter eventually bumps into: the moment you start editing too early, the whole thing can fall apart. He once wrote… “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing […]
Why Do We Write Songs And Why Your “Why” Is Important
Every songwriter, no matter how long they’ve been at it, eventually runs into that quiet moment where the question sneaks in… Why am I doing this? It rarely arrives with fireworks. It shows up late at night when you’re stuck on a verse that won’t behave, or during a long drive when a melody loops […]
Why Songwriters Must Embrace Discomfort In Order to Truly Go All the Way With Their Craft
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”— Charles Bukowski There’s a brutal kind of beauty in that quote. Bukowski wasn’t talking about songwriting, but he might as well have been. Because if you’re serious about writing songs that matter (not just clever lines or catchy choruses, but something that […]
Commit Fully to the Song: Why Half-Writing Isn’t Enough
You know that folder… the one with 147 unfinished demos? We all have it (I know I do). Verse fragments. Voice memos. Half-formed chorus ideas that once lit a fire, only to fade into digital dust. It’s not that those ideas were bad. Most of them were probably pretty good. The real issue? We didn’t […]